PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 4028, 26 May 1931, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

Broadcasting conditions are nothing if not versatile in thematic material, and the British company has been treating its listeners-in to the latest results, not of race meetings and sporting events, but of the infinitely less significant trends of scientific thought. Eddington, Jeans, Huxley, and others have collaborated in a popular symposium and we have relativity, the quanta theory, the spacetime continuum in easily assimilable form. From the lips of these high priests of research, we learn that a mechanistic view of the universe, rightly or wrongly attributed to the Victorian era (the author, seemingly, of all our sins), has seceded in favour of a less confident and dogmatic, a more philosophic treatment of the data of science. The very conclusions of Newton, regarded hitherto as basic and impregnable, yield to the newer concepts of Einstein. The atom appears a discredited thing, and matter itself resolves into electrons, electrons to imponderable radiations and energies, and, by a nimble revolution, we are brought back to the way of the idealists. What would Dr Johnson say of it all? The story of his pragmatism is generally known, but let me quote the ipsissima verba:

Alter we came out of church, we stood talking for some time of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, •and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till lie rebounded from it (sic) “ I refute it thus.”

Our sage of Chelsea, in his day, weighed the Empire of all India in his scales with that other national possession William Shakespeare. What was the result of this quantitative process? India kicked the beam. Sooner than surrender “ Hamlet ” and “ Lear,” Carlyle would have the wealth of all the Ind, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, given in fee to other and alien sovereignties. Speaking to the delegates of the final plenary session of the Round Table Conference held in London Mr Ramsay MacDonald said: If we are animated by anything, it is by the conception of India herself and India a unity. As regards the form of the Constitution, all your speakers have said it has been determined that it is to be a Federation. Before you came, the structure of the Indian Constitution was in doubt. You came and your words made it possible for us to build up a Constitution and to put political weight upon it of the nature of an all-India Federation. Brave words, these, but it would seem that, for the time being, Labour, Liberal, and Conservative (despite Mr Churchill) are to combine to endow the millions of India with some form of autonomy. The retiring Viceroy, Lord Irwin, has played a distinguished part in treating with that enigmatic person Mr Gandhi. Lord Willingdon’s first year may see this humble emissary of all India proceeding to London to give final imprimaturs. With Sir John Simon thrown in, the cause has been well sponsored.

Mr Gandhi, himself, has been reported to have said that if a visit to Buckingham Palace lie ,on his official programme, there will be no donning ot Court dress, knee-breeches and buckles for him; the. traditional simplicity of loincloth will be the only right and fitting panoply. His Majesty, he said, would not have it otherwise. An interesting test, this, and a different picture from the Durbar glories associated with the conception of the King-Emperor. Maharajahs, Rajahs, Jams, and Gaekwars, encrusted with diamonds and seedpearls, give way for this humbly clad ascetic! A vivid story, and illustrative of the difference between “ regular patrician ” and “ low degree ” in the domestic circle of India is related by Mr Tennyson Cole. When he was executing commissions in India for the Maharajah of Kapurthala, the latter drew his attention to a portrait of one of his ancestors and said: “It has been proved beyond all doubt in our family archives that that worthy man had five hundred wives, and children by all of them.** As Court painter, Mr Cole had been asked by an official to refrain from painting the picturesque natives he saw along the roadside; but he surmounted the objection by telling the Maharajah: — If you should see me painting a ■ native labourer, mending the roads, perhaps you will forgive me. After all, how can your Highness know but that an Indian of this seemingly lowly origin may not be one of your relations, for it could hardly have been possible for the distinguished ancestor you mention to have found palaces for all his children?

The Maharajah laughed uproariously at this idea, and told Mr Cole that for the future he could paint any of the humbler native folk he pleased.

The Professor of Biology in the Otago University must by now be doyen of his fellows, a dean among deans. The mere passage of the years has added to him its inevitable heritage of a sanctity bordering the pontifical, a nimbus of infallibility. Professor Hutton was first in the order of our biologists; then came Jeffrey Parker, a man of diminutive stature, whose father, before him, was an eminent scientist. Dr Benham succeeded to the chair, and to many generations of undergraduates has expounded the mysteries of life, beginning with “ ej'e of newt and toe of frog.” As a lecturer he is said to have adopted the apt explanations that lie readiest to hand and to have demonstrated integuments and subjacent tissues by the stripping in reverse order of waistcoat, coat, and finally surtout, the 'epidermis. His public utterances, of late, have savoured not of the buoyant activities of the living, but of atrophy and decay, the “ sere and yellow leaf.” “ New Zealand,” he has concluded, “is the best place in the world to die in.” One would appreciate a possibly more appropriate dictum as to what is the best place in the world to live in. Professor Benham has explored the classic retreats of the cote d’azur and the cote d’argent; does the long white cloud of the Pacific still hold pride of place? And what of Dunedin, and its peculiar virtues and properties? It is to be hoped that when senescence beckons to the Professor, and he seems a long way still, out of sight, Dunedin will be privileged to have his quietus.

A specimen of Mr H. M. Hyndman’s vigour in vituperation appears in a recent publication of the Countess of Warwick —Socialists both. He is describing Viscount Grey of Falloden: An ignorant homunculus. I knew him years ago when he took the Foreign Office. He knew no language but his own, and that imperfectly. - I would give a trifle to have a go at Grey in the House of Commons. 1 would strip that high and mighty manner off him before I had been at it five minutes. Poor Grey floundering along in a happy-go-lucky fashion because he has neither the brains nor the knowledge equal to anything-better! What is to be said of such ill-con-sidered and inconsiderate language? A poor travesty of Carlylese! It was once proposed to Carlyle that he should be introduced to Swinburne and he retorted: Mr Swinburne is a wee man that lives in a sewer and makes it dirtier. No! I do not desire to see him. Admirable manners on the part of the Scotsman, but then gall was his favoured medium! A correspondent from St. Clair, wishing to be weather-wise and appealing to me as to a never failing fount of omniscience, requests an explanation of the term “ anti-cyclone.” Having enj deavoured to repair the breaches in my knowledge of physiography, I trust I shall not be adjured, like Coleridge—

Explaining metaphysics to the nation— I wish he would explain his explanation. Some winds blow in straight lines, as the trade winds, while others follow circular or elliptical courses. These are the cyclones (Greek: “ Kuklos,” a circle). But they not only revolve in an elliptical course over the face of the globe; they also rotate at one and the same time. In these respects,

cyclones resemble the earth itself. A cyclone, in miniature, is see? in the circular eddies of dust that gyrate in odd corners of the streets. In the southern hemisphere the cyclone rotates in the same direction as the hands of a watch, and the anti-cyclone rotates in a contrary motion. Meteorologists appear to differ in their explanations of all the phenomena of a cyclone, and, when experts disagree, it is not for the inexpert to take sides, but certain wellknown laws are readily appreciable. A wind is due to a variation of pressure in the atmosphere, caused by the presence of water vapour. This is, bulk for bulk, much lighter than dry air, and when present in large quantities in certain localities gives rise to inequality of pressure, and consequent winds. In a cyclone, the inner mass of cloud is of low pressure, and the outer zone is of greater pressure. The heavier air flows in towards the centre and the storm begins, a whirling, revolving wind of varying degrees of intensity. In the anti-cyclone, the conditions are reversed; the air flows out from the central mass to the outer mass, from a higher to a lower pressure. There are other changes in the conditions of the atmosphere that give rise to an alteration of pressure, as, for instance, the varying amount of heat, but as this involves the thermometer as well as the barometer, I shall stop. Apparently the old adage “ The wind bloweth where it listeth ” is not entire!v justified. Civis.